Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/307

 topic of the hour in London. The seceders had many sympathisers; but there were not a few who were offended by the frivolity of the separation, and who mistrusted the ambition for a “clean ground” and a “new lump”. Unity, though all had shared in reducing it to a name, not to say to a byword, was still the ideal of many. Moreover, Darby’s rejection of the projects of the seceders was peremptory in the extreme. In reply to a letter from their leader, dated September 18, 1880, he wrote, “I have not remarked those who have taken the ground you do have advanced in holiness and spirituality, rather the contrary, and I am satisfied it is the path of pretension, not of faith. … Were the movement of those you join yourself to, to break up Brethren, … your party … would I think be the very last I should be with.” Nor was this all. In the previous July Darby had written from Dublin with evident reference to the common cry that division was the only cure,—“As regards division, I am as decided as possible. … I have long felt that this party which assumes to be the godly one is the one to be feared. … I should add that Stoney wrote in reply, that he was as far from division as I could suppose; but I do not think he knows what he is doing.”

Darby was thus at feud with both parties; for on the other side were those who not only considered the moral charges against Cronin preposterous, but who held that his ecclesiastical delinquency had been greatly overstated. They would have said, “An ecclesiastical irregularity,” where others cried, “Schism”. In short, a party was forming that had only partially imbibed the extreme High Church principles of the sect. This party really believed that the Bethesda discipline was imperatively